fromlostdays

For my two cents, this definitely sounds like it should be user contribution, and unless there is some starling breakthrough in graphics, there's no reason at all to do a video on an emu release. Not just a thread, but a dedicated section of the forum. ANDDDDD, unpopular opinion, but to save the credibility, accessibility and general sanity of it, you should only let a select few post to the section. People like you (Brad) and DOS and others who can actually parse the information in a changelog. Who bother testing, and can even speak on comparisons. Then let the COMMENTS be open to everyone. In that way, you guys would be more like journalists, you'd have an entire section of informative posts like these, and it would keep itself organized. It would also draw traffic to this site. Just my thoughts.

As far as resolution goes, under Video, I set the Aspect Ratio Index to Core Provided. This way it is the proper aspect ratio for the RetroArch config that everything else was based on. If I need to change a cores aspect ratio later I only apply the change to that systems new custom config. I am with you though, I don't like the image to be stretched either. SNES should be in a box on your screen. However, I don't use fullscreen, and very short testing I can't figure out how to keep the aspect ratio correct in fullscreen either. Hopefully someone else figured that one out. I always run fullscreen (I read it reduces input lag) with SNES keeping 4:3 and black borders around it. I've never had a problem doing it, so I'm sort of unsure what results you two could possibly be getting? My settings: Full Screen = True Aspect = Core Provided The only other thing I can think of is that I have to turn... er i'm at work and I can't remember exactly but its something like "Integer Scaling" .... (same menu as fullscreen etc.) off. If I don't, the play screen just becomes a smaller box and doesn't reach the top and bottom of the screen. 1. I'm trying to get shaders working in SNES9X Next through RA, but not having much luck. When I apply a shader in RA, it doesn't seem to change anything visually. I could however get the 2x filter working through the RA menu (which is the look I'm going for - high res). I enabled shaders, chose 1 pass, selected the .cg shader (e.g. hq4x.cg), apply changes - but no difference. Is there something I'm missing there? Do any video settings e.g. bilinear filtering affect the shaders? I've never noticed any change using an hq4x filter on snes. I'm not even sure what its supposed to do. Maybe RetroArch fails on this one? At any rate, you seem to be applying the shaders correctly, it just doesn't have any affect that I could notice. Personally, I actually like the rounded cartoony look, and Sabr was a MUST... until I discovered XBr. There IS a shader that will make the image sharper and pixilate it a bit.... I think its called Sharp Bilinear.... and its either in the "Retro" folder or the "Misc" folder by default, can't remember which one. FYI I run BSNES Accuracy Mercury and as long as I have the dsp roms in the systems folder, its absolutely accurate.

3. I have added emulators and games, is there anything else I haven't thought of that will make the experience more streamlined from the sofa? This might seem like an odd answer to that question, but as a fellow Coucher, I recommend using RetroArch for every system it will emulate (many many of them). Here's why: Without taking my hands off the controller, (I have to open Kodi first, but I'm going to shell it soon): kodi is open, automatically syncs with my 360 controller. Navigate to bigbox. Bigbox is open, automatically syncs with my 360 controller, just one time set up. Navigate to game. RetroArch is now open, emulating game. RA automatically syncs with my 360 controller, no set up required, but I have some button mapping tweaks. Play Game. Realize I want to change a setting in RetroArch. Press in both sticks and this brings up the RetroArch Menu, which looks nice and can also function as a Pause. Menu auto synced to controller as well. Change shader, control settings, anything I want. Resume game. Now I'm done playing. To exit I can set keys to close RA in BigBox, OR I can reopen RA menu and just choose exit game from there. I'm back at BigBox. Navigate to Exit. I'm back on Kodi, play music while I cook dinner. I did all of this without taking my hands off the controller, with absolutely minimal set up, and without using Xpadder or Joy2key at all. Just a thought. Especially because you can bind "Open RetroArch Menu" to controller, it is the best for Couches IMO.

You guys think the updates are worth switching from the wonderful compatibility of mednafen, or in my case RA with mednafen core, to Epsxe with these updates? I'd really like your opinion on it, in terms of compatibility, speed, hacks, saves, overall functionality, controller support and graphics etc. I play a lot of PS1 games. Also, I can't see the updates because the site is blocked at my work.

Deadpool. Is. Awesome. I'm pretty antisocial but even I'll go to theaters. Why wouldn't you.... nevermind. I been meaning to ask where launchbox gets it info in order to parse the romset like that? How reliable are those settings? Lastly, will LaunchBox experience any slowdown if I import thousands of mame games? I'm really trying not to do it (import them all), but picking your favorites out of ten thousand arcades is.... daunting.

Have only imported a few games, and there are mulitple threads on here you want to look at, but for starters call the Platform "Arcade" and not "Mame". This allows you to use some of the nifty mame import features of LB like excluding clones and preferring regions. https://www.launchbox-app.com/announcements/new-list-of-emulator-settings-and-mame-import-tools https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/tool-to-import-metadata-for-mame-roms-from-mame-dat-or-arcadehits-net/page-2

This is the video I followed: its pretty generic, uninstalling bloat and turning off certain services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwiHog2leMM

Tangentially, I have almost 100 configs in my old RA setup I use with HyperSpin, all set up on some nightly from last year, all using the old GUI, and not optimized for my current display. I didn't want to change each config individually, and honestly I have too many systems on that setup, stuff I'll never really use except to show off to friends occasionally e.g Konix Multi System with 3 games. I decided with LaunchBox to focus on the dozen or so systems I actually use. It might be taboo to say here, but I actually have LaunchBox set to launch HyperSpin if I ever feel like scrolling through 50k games. Plus, I learned a lot about RA in the interim and so in the end it actually was easier just to make the new configs. I actually carry two versions of RA now. The newest one I was setting up in the LaunchBox folder, and my old one I renamed to RetroArchMess (as in I use it mainly for the mess core). At any rate, I played ALOT of PS1 games and also set up PS2 and got dirty with some old Devil May Cry last night but still no crash. I think there might be something to the idea that I had RocketLauncherUI open a lot when it was crashing. Or maybe it just doesn't like too much running in the background.. like Chrome, torrent service, etc. I also recently watched a video on how to optimize windows 10 for gaming and went through those steps, so maybe that helped? Just occured me, the only other thing that was different is that now I have my mayflash dolphinbar unplugged completely. Did that to see if I could get a handle on how windows and RA handle multiple 360 controllers. DOS, do you use the dolphinbar? I want to emphasize that for me it was crashing 2 or three times a night, not just occasionally. Now, seems to have stopped crashing completely.

As someone who is shitlisted, can confirm its real, and also that PD is the best place to get up to date mame roms. Can also confirm that Clrmamepro works like a charm for updating, but I don't think its easier. Just faster. After I learned how to do it, I still just redownloaded the newer sets, as its one click then forget about it. Also Bitgamer has the 169 set, but its not complete. At this point I'm with SentinelBrad, I just don't try anymore.

RocketLauncher does allow you to use AHK scripting for controller support. I don't personally use it, but the more I use Windows 10, the more I'm seeing SOME kinds of bugs.

Since I posted this, it hasn't crashed once. And I left AHK set to on. I even had Chrono Cross paused for like an hour last night, as company came over, and when I got back everything was still working fine. The only thing I can think of is that when this was happening frequently, I was doing a lot more with RocketLauncher and LaunchBox in terms of set up. RocketLauncherUI was pretty much always open in the background, and I had usually added or subtracted some games or artwork or systems or something. I was also launching a lot, as I had just downloaded the latest version of RetroArch and was rebuilding my per system configs. More action in other words, but that's all I got.

you have to be more specific man. But check and see if the one that won't import is in the ALL section. If it is, delete it.

Bad news. I just tried running the game, and disconnecting the controller via taking out the battery. No crash Did the same and waited for it to turn itself naturally no crash. I did this with AHK enabled, and disabled both, and BigBox didn't crash once. It must only happen after the emu has been running for a while.... I guess... and though I'm not too tech savvy that doesn't make much sense. I'll investigate further, but so far the controller thing in general doesn't seem to be panning out.

I can't draw stick figures and I've never used photoshop, and I may be beating a dead horse, but my vote goes for Acheivement Unlocked: Installed LaunchBox. It appeals to the gross hipster in me, so if anyone EVER asked what my shirt meant I could be like: "I only play the finest of retro video games, you wouldn't understand." Also, I would say this at a Street Fighter or Halo 5 tourney I'm participating in. Also, someone there WOULD understand and we'd be lifelong friends after that. I made myself sad just now.

I had a similar problem not too long ago, and theres a thread about it in the Noobs section, but need more info. How exactly did you delete the game from launchbox? It sounds like you're not completely deleting it for whatever reason. For instance, I deleted the system and all my games stayed in LaunchBox but under the "All" menu, and I had to go in there, select them all, and delete them like that before I could reimport them.

I do, at that. I'll try turning it off and report back in tonight. I can already think of a workaround in retroarch anyway, by setting the RA menu to open with L3 and R3 and exiting from in there. I could also just exit through Rocketlauncher Pause. At any rate, I'll try it.

Because of how easy LaunchBox is to set up and use, I've been doing a fair amount of actual gaming. Specifically, I'm neck deep in a very satisfying replay of Chrono Cross. I've noticed though that both LaunchBox and BigBox will, rather frequently, close while the emulation is still happening. It doesn't even mess with the emulation at all, just a windows error dialogue pops up, and goes away, and LB or BB closes in the background. Last night, I noticed that it closed immediately following my Wireless Xbox 360 controller powering itself down. (I was eating and playing on my phone at the time). I can't confirm with 100 percent certainty that the two things are connected, and that my controller disconnecting caused it 100 percent of the time, but it could very well be that they are and it has. I often leave the emulator (usually RetroArch) running while I eat, or smoke a cig, or something. I also have been trying to get my Xbox 360 controller, my Wii Motes, and RetroArch to play nicely together (an absolute nightmare) which means controllers were probably powering down a lot and I didn't even realize it at the time. At any rate, just wanted to report on it, and see if anyone else has seen anything similar. Thanks! Should note that I'm using Windows 10 which is great, but seems to have trouble relinquishing focus, and has some pretty serious issues with the taskbar, at least for me, which sometimes steals focus from (windowed fullscreened) applications and at other times just disappears entirely.

Would this file work for starting up Kodi instead, of course changing the path to kodi and using kodi.exe like: taskkill /f /im explorer.exe cd C:\<path to kodi directory\ Kodi.exe start explorer.exe Thanks! Walter.

Yeah, as stated above you're definitely overthinking this. Open RetroArch, go to Directory (Or Paths) I forget what they call it. Find out what RetroArch has listed as your save directory. If it says "Default" I'm pretty sure that means you should just dump all your save files into the rom folder. I think the default storage location for RA saves is Rom directory. In this case put them into the launchbox rom folder because that's where LaunchBox is getting the games. Or you can simply put them all into another directory and make sure you're point RA to that directory. I recommend this method. As stated above, this has nothing to do with LaunchBox and importing a bunch of srm or eep files will just clutter up your lists. Save files should never be LAUNCHED, only read by the emulator when you launch your actual rom. The only thing RocketLauncher can do for your save files is that it's designed to create a saves\system name folder in your RA directory and sort your saves by system. This is nifty if you like to organize that way, but its not necessary. Do you use different configs for different systems? If so, you'll have to set the paths like explained above for each config. If not, just set them in the retroarch.config and you're golden. Edit: To be clear, you should NOT import save files into LaunchBox. If you want to keep them in your rom directory, move them first, import just your roms into LaunchBox and then move them back. I recommend instead that you create a folder/directory called "save" "saves" or whatever and point the RA saves path to it.

As a cheap, inefficient fix (which I am not proud of) -created a duplicate but stripped down retroarch folder (just the bare min) and named it Retroarch-alt -added a new emulator in LB, called Retroarch-alt which referenced the new duplicated folder above -Did a bulk edit on my GBC collection and told it to use the new emulator. I'm glad you got it working, but I agree, there is no reason you should have to have 2 installed versions of RetroArch to take advantage of one of it's basic features. Also, your issues ARE a contribution to any forum as they provide information and possibly answers for people who come later. You even posted a solution when you got it working (even if its just a workaround) which is good etiquette. I'm just a newbie here but my only suggestion is to try to sum up your problem more specifically in the titles of your posts, to allow for easier searching. :D

Dude, that's awesome. Do you know if there is a way to have LaunchBox just launch a regular .exe that isn't a game in either the windows or steam folders, etc. I'm thinking specifically of having it launch Chrome. My comp is hooked up to my television in the living room and I'm trying to like never see the desktop. :D

I'm out of my league here but do you have "configuration per core" turned OFF on ALL of those configs, and also on your RetroArch.cfg. The reason I suggest this is because I've never been able to figure out where RA stores its shader information. I've looked through all the configs, but I have long suspected that RetroArch gets information from multiple config "sources" when it boots. If its reading the per core config named after the core (you listed above) then it doesn't matter what you put in the other two. It might not even matter if you load them manually, as RA might prioritize the per core config. It's all I got, but try turning that setting off.

I personally encourage people to visit the RL forums for questions and troubleshooting. Having said that, I wasn't going to post this, but it seems like it might have a place here after all. This doesn't cover integration with LaunchBox yet, as I'm hesitant to speak on the program until I've had more experience with it. I apologize for a lack of screenshots here people, but here's a quick guide on setting up RocketLauncher and getting it ready for LaunchBox. I also apologize if the formatting is wonky in places. I wrote this at work and its a copy and paste job. Once you get the basics, it takes less than 5 mintues to set up a system in RL. But before you do that, you need to set up LaunchBox as your Active Front-End in RL. Step One: Setting up LaunchBox as a Front-End for RocketLauncher Please note that Rocketlauncher.exe is useless to you. You will now and probably forever be making all of your changes in RockerlauncherUI.exe. It will be in a subfolder named “RockerLauncherUI”. If you’re curious, this step is necessary because Rocketlauncher was designed to support multiple front ends simultaneously. So you’ve installed RocketLauncher. Now what? Open RocketLauncherUI Don’t freak out. There’s a lot of stuff but that’s because RL has a lot of options. The UI gets very intuitive once you work with it a little bit. Click the tab on the top right of the UI called “RocketLauncherUI” Directly below that, and to the left, you’ll see another smaller tab called “Front Ends”. Click it. Now click the green Plus Sign. It’ll ask you for a name: Input LaunchBox or something similar. Browse to the path of the LaunchBox.exe Make sure and set both plugin tabs to “RocketLauncherUI.” Click the save icon (It looks like a little floppy disk) Now you need to make LaunchBox your default and Active front end. Under the Front Ends tab, highlight the new Launcbox Front End profile you created Above there are buttons to Set As Default Front End Set As Active Front End Click both, and on the right you should see the little checkbox marking off LaunchBox as your active and your default front end. Congrats! You’re done. Step Two: Setting Up Your First Emulator in RocketLauncherUI: RocketLauncher supports too many emulators for me to bother counting, and setting them up is easy. For new users, the most important thing to understand is the concept of Global Emulators. If you set up your emulator as a Global Emulator, you can set that emulator to any system you want with just a few clicks. Even if you only plan to use an emulator for one system, you should set it up globally in RL. Here’s how: The big rectangle on the left of the UI with the word “Global” in it is your Systems Tab. When you start adding systems they will appear here, but your Global System will never disappear. It’s there that we want to set up our emulator. Click Global in the Systems Tab. Click the “Emulators” Tab (top middle) You should see a pretty impressive list of supported emulators at the bottom. Scroll through it until you see your preferred emulator and double click it. A new window will pop up: Feel free to rename the emulator if you’re so inclined. Set the path to the emulator.exe. There should be a module listed the same name as the emulator with the .ahk extension e.g “RetroArch.ahk”. You don’t need to worry about any of the options on the bottom of this window for most systems. Lastly: Make sure the extension of your roms is listed in the File Extensions slot. If it isn’t, the emulator may not support your romset, but it might, so go ahead and add your extension, separate by this thing | . Its right above your enter key on your keyboard. No spaces. Having a bunch of unused extensions in this slot is expected, and perfectly fine, so long as your rom extension is listed there. Example: sfc|smc|7z|zip Congrats, you’ve set up your first Global Emulator. Global Emulators can be assigned to any system you create, though obviously they will only work for supported systems. Step 3: Setting Up Your First System in RocketLauncher RocketLauncher, like LaunchBox needs a few additional things before it can launch games. Namely, it needs to know where to find your roms, and it needs an xml list to populate its own games lists for your systems. We’ll be using Super Nintendo as an example. To set up a system in RocketLauncher, on the top left of the UI there’s a green plus sign. When you however over it, it should say “Add New System”. Click it. Naming is important* As far as naming your system goes, you’re going to want to use Rocketlauncher standard naming conventions. This will allow Rocketlauncher to recognize your system and show the default artwork etc. The naming is pretty intuitive, pretty much what you would see on a box if you bought a certain console, but you want to be sure you get the name right to save yourself possible trouble later on. In order to get the right names, in your rocketlauncher folder you should navigate to: Rocketlauncher/rocketlauncherui/media/icons The icons in the icon folder use the preferred naming convention. For instance, Correct: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Incorrect: Super Nintendo, SNES, or any other variation. So in this instance, the name does matter. Also note that the name you choose here is going to affect the code you have to put into LaunchBox to make these programs work together. Once you have it right, click “Next” In the next section, Select Emulator, you merely click the magnifying glass and browse to your emulator exe. You’ve already done this once when you set up your emulator as a Global Emulator. This step is going to tell RL to use that emulator’s listed extensions when generating its system XML and auditing your roms. In the next section, Select Rom Path(s), click the green plus sign and add the path to your roms folder. In the next section Database creation, you’re going to want to Generate Database from Rom Path. Explanation: Like LaunchBox, Rocketlauncher will automatically create an xml list of all the files in the rom folder. Unlike LaunchBox, RocketLauncher will only see the files that have extensions listed under the emulator extensions for that system. This can be a problem if, for instance, you’re using retroarch, and your roms have a .xyz extension, and you didn’t put that under the retroarch extensions like we talked about above. RocketLauncher will not see any files with the .xyz extension, and creating the database will fail. If you get an error here saying you have no roms in your rom folder, you have to go back to the Emulators Tab, find your emulator, and make sure the extensions are listed there as noted above, then try again. Further note, the databse will generate even if you have your roms zipped, as long as the zip extension is noted under your emulator, and for the most part, zip|7z automatically are. Click next. You’re done. Check the Overview. Looks good? Click finish You should get an “Are you sure” pop up. You are. You should then see another popup saying Database is properly generated. Congrats, RL is set up, and you should be able to immediately launch games from within it. To test this, look at the Systems Tab again and you should see your new system there. Instead of clicking Global, this time click [system name], and then click the “Games” tab. Audit your games, (they should show up green) click a game, and click the launch button. Again, I encourage you to visit the RocketLauncher forums and browse around, introduce yourself, etc. if you're interested in using it as a Launcher. Either way, Happy gaming.

To be clear in case anyone else does what I did, the reason I had to do it that way (lised above) was because like a dope I had already deleted PS1 as a platform, so if, like me, you do this first, the only way to get at the game entries is through the ALL view. A better solution like DOS said above is to just select the games while viewing them sorted by system and delete them there. Less room for error. But both ways work. Thanks again for your help. :D

To flesh this out: I made sure under platforms I selected ALL (my ps1 games were still there) I went to View, and instead of Box Art View clicked List View. In List View I sorted by Platform, and all of the games that were "Platformless" were sorted for me. A game without a platform doesn't say None in the Platform column, that column will just be blank. I selected all of them and deleted them. Then I just re-added Sony Playstation like normal and joy. It worked. Thanks!